Ian Hart, Professor of Tumour Biology, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, is perhaps the best known of the United Kingdom’s research workers in the field of Metastasis. A series of seminal papers with Josh Fidler established the extremely important point that tumours contain metastatic sub-populations, and characterised the cell and molecular biological basis for this heterogeneity, leading to the isolation of sub-populations of increased invasiveness and metastatic potential. Ian’s lab were among the first to demonstrate the important point that down-regulation of E-cadherin activity advances metastatic spread, and he was also amongst the first to show that integrins were also pivotal in defining metastatic profiles of tumours. His more recent work has concentrated on the importance of the RHAMM protein, thought to be a hyaluronate surface receptor, in the metastatic process, and he has shown that this molecule acts as a microtubules and actin-filament binding protein. He has also championed the gene therapy approach using tissue-specific promoters which limit the expression of such molecules as pro-drug activating enzymes to tumour cells.